Dutchman paddling on Mississippi River stops in Coon Rapids

Published August 30, 2013 at 1:00 pm

Dutch adventurer Henk van der Klok stopped in Coon Rapids last week during his quest to paddle the length of the Mississippi River from its source in Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico.
Henk van der Klok, Dutch adventurer, is paddling the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. He stopped in Coon Rapids last week. Submitted photo

He began his journey at Lake Itasca July 24 and hopes to finish in late October.

But van der Klok, 27, is doing more than paddling down the river in a kayak.

He is making a three-part documentary about the journey, he said in an email interview.

“I’m paddling the Mississippi from source to sea and am making a documentary series about the challenge and the pollution in the river,” van der Klok said.

According to van der Klok, this year has seen the biggest dead zone ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I have some water from Lake Itasca with me that I will take to the Gulf,” van der Klok said in his email. “I hope to give people more awareness of what a dead zone is and what they can do to help decrease it.”

In Davenport, Iowa, he plans to visit Chad Pregracke, who is known for his lifelong dedication to clean up the river, he wrote.

He started by hitchhiking across Europe and made his way to the south of France.

“From there I walked the way of St. James, a 500-mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,” van der Klok wrote. “I loved the traveling and not knowing where I was going to be a week from now so I decided to keep going.”

According to van der Klok, in the last two years he has lived with nomads in the Sahara, built a hut on a small island in Indonesia and lived there until he was robbed.

“I hitchhiked across Australia, worked there for a while and continued on to travel across Mongolia and take the Trans Siberia Express back to Europe,” van der Klok wrote.

“I really wanted to do more walking, because these long journeys on foot have a way of teaching you to slow down and see the slow changes in your environment.”

But when he decided to walk from England to Rome in Italy, he injured his foot near the end of his journey and was told he had to rest it for six months.

“I didn’t want to stop experiencing adventures so I decided to kayak the entire length of the Mississippi because I keep my legs up all day,” van der Klok said.

He arrived in Coon Rapids the afternoon of Aug. 19, spend a day with a friend in Coon Rapids, then launched back into the river on Brooklyn Park side the morning of Aug. 21.